…Explains why December salary was delayed
The Federal government has warned Nigerians to be wary of those it said were playing fast and loose with numbers especially as the 2015 general elections gears up with the sole aim of deceiving them.
The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who made this assertion while reacting to insinuations in some quarters that the Nigerian Economy was broke in a radio programme monitored by Primetime Reporters in Lagos dismissed the rumour as untrue.
Okonjo-Iweala who admitted that Nigeria was in for tougher times in the months ahead however stated that those who were peddling the rumour of the country being broke did the same in past three years and now they are in for the game they knew how best to play saying that their only aim was to get Nigerians alarmed thereby painting a picture of hopelessness and helplessness in the polity.
According to her,” but Nigerians cannot be deceived, we have told them the truth. All these three years that they said the economy was broke, have we not been paying? Has the country not been running? And they have continued it. Now that they saw that the oil price has fallen and now they are latching into that. I have been clear very clear in saying that it is going to be a difficult year for the country but this is something we can manage”.
On why the salaries of some agencies were delayed last December, she said, “we were able to pay salaries. That is the other story going around that we were not able to pay. In December, the reason why salary took so long was because the system we are now using, the Government Integrated Financial Management System which is new actually locked out some agencies when they tried to take more money to pay more people than are in the system”.
“You know the old game where we used to have money disappearing with ghost workers, the system now locked 14 agencies out and we have to restore them for payment manually because it would not allow their people to be paid. That was why the thing took so long”.
She further clarified that the system shut those agencies out because there was a programmed salary in the system adding that when the budget was exceeded and one tries to add more people, it would shut down on its own even as she said that she had the list of the 14 agencies that were involved in the incident.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala disclosed that the Federal Government did not owe the states any of their revenues explaining that the way the federation and the constitution worked, the federal government shared everything that came into the government coffers with the federating states.
While dismissing the idea that the federal government owed the states as untrue, she averred that the federal government could publish all the information for Nigerians to know the truth.
She further explained that it was not true that if any local government in the country failed to pay its staff, it was because the federal government owed saying that the money for the local governments by the constitution goes to the states.
When asked if the federal government should be blamed if a state failed to pay the workers’ salaries in the state, she had this to say, “No, you have to go to the state government to find out why that is happening. There has been a drop in the income for the entire country, that is the truth. But what you have to do is to prioritize. If you prioritize that salary is the first thing that you do, then you pay salaries. The money that they get is enough to pay people”.
“Each government, we have a very loose fiscal federalism, we cannot tell them what priorities to set. Federal government cannot tell the states, we can only urge them, encourage them and we meet with the Finance Commissioners, we share with them how we are doing our own priorities. But to saying that the Federal government is with-holding their money is absolutely not true”.
